Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Flashbacks are hell

With more than 52 years of service to America’s largest youth baseball organization, Bill Smith of Chickasha has been named to the Babe Ruth League’s National Hall of Fame.

The Babe Ruth International Board of Directors unanimously elected Smith at its annual meeting in Florida this fall. Smith joins 150 individuals and organizations who have earned the distinction.

“Bill was involved in the Babe Ruth League for 52 years,” said Steve Tellefsen, Babe Ruth League president and CEO. “He proved on numerous occasions to be one of the most formidable forces that kept the league on the cutting edge of the youth sports arena.”

“The Babe Ruth League is devoted to helping America’s kids find early success in sports,” says Smith, a lifelong baseball fan.

Pedant’s Corner

The Rule V draft fits perfectly in the lexicon of baseball, where words like "non-tendered," "infield fly," and "non-waiver trade deadline" cause casual fans to scratch their heads in bewilderment. (To answer the usual first question – V is a Roman numeral, not a letter.)

Think Harder

In an effort to dissuade top amateurs from skipping out to play professionally abroad--as corporate league righty Junichi Tazawa has done--Nippon Professional Baseball is studying a plan to ban them from playing on their return to Japan.

One version under consideration would prevent NPB teams from signing players for two or three years after they returned to Japan, depending on their status when they left.

In that scheme, players who left after high school ball, such as Yamaguchi did when he signed a minor league deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks, would be barred from joining an NPB team for three years upon returning to Japan.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail and NPB will elect not to throw the babies out with the bath water.

The only way to curb the talent drain is to raise the game. This, however, is a vast, complex undertaking. It's much, much easier to make rules, even if they lead nowhere and turn out to be counterproductive . . . It's not enough that NPB uses a draft to deny amateurs the right to sell their services to the highest bidder. Some now want to punish those who aim for a higher goal . . . For now, however, the overriding concern seems to be about plugging leaks in an obsolete system rather than building something seaworthy.

Offer, acceptance, consideration

“From our perspective, we reached an agreement Monday night,” Braves General Manager Frank Wren said. “They asked for a term sheet for us to sign on Tuesday morning, and we sent over the signed termed sheet” . . .

. . . Earlier Wednesday, Kinzer said Furcal never accepted the Braves’ offer.

“They know we didn’t have a signed contract, that we didn’t even have a verbal agreement,” he said.

Today at THT

The Snyder Case

I've been stumped by a question that marries my two biggest interests: baseball and literature. I'm reading Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance, which was the first mystery he wrote about Nero Wolfe (who would go on to star in 43 novels, a radio show -- wherein he was played by the incomparable Sydney Greenstreet -- and a couple of television shows), and at one point Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's primary operative, writes, appropos of being astonished anew by the beauty of Wolfe's orchid collection, "It was like other things I've noticed, for instance no matter how often you may have seen Snyder leap in the air and one-handed spear a hot liner like one streak of lightning stopping another one, when you see it again your heart stops."

I love that metaphor--"like one streak of lightning stopping another one"--and at first I thought, "Oh, he's talking about Duke Snider." Only, the spelling is wrong . . . and the novel was published in 1934. So off to Baseball-Reference I went . . . and I don't find any Snyders who would seem to be right. Any ideas at all whom Stout might have had in mind? I'm willing to believe that misspelling was involved, if necessary, but I've not come up with an answer so far.